Carl-Richard

Your brain requires novelty. Introduce some novelty to your life.

@DocWatts ?

It's either all or nothing, am I right?

What about deconstructing libertarianism?

The dude is perfect.

Many years ago, I delivered my laptop to the same place I bought it from for repairs (the biggest electronics company in my country). They said they couldn't fix it but that I could get a replacement laptop with the same specs, so I agreed to that. My laptop had a very powerful Intel Core i7, and the replacement one had a lousy Intel Core i5 and I could feel the difference immediately. Lesson: don't trust salespeople (?)

Remember that therapy is for people who are lacking something and are therefore more inclined to accept an eventual trade-off that you as a healthy person might want to avoid. Just because medicine is supposed to make people better doesn't mean you should take it

Not much to say other than being aware of justifications and excuses for taking the easy way out and avoiding growth. Useful concepts from psychology that you can try to identify within yourself and work around would be attribution style (internalizing vs. externalizing behavior), self-handicapping etc. That would be a more general example. Something more specific could be an example from my own life: I used to just think excessively as an escape from reality. Instead of listening to my conscience and performing the correct actions in the world, I would simply fantasize about things I was interested in. Drugs was a factor in that as well. The way out for me was shifting my interests into something healthier, and that happened to be meditation, and that eventually lead to the end of much overthinking on my part.

The problem is that most people who are willing to think only do so compulsively about the things that interest them and their survival needs. To really claim the power of your mind, you must become aware of how these survival pressures are driving all of your thoughts, fears, attachments and beliefs, and that requires going beyond the mind. Now, who is gonna do that? Very few. Then, when you actually pursue that path, you'll sooner or later realize the limitations of thought and start relying on quiet, intuitive action instead, and then you might even lose all of the forms of internal monologue as well. So that's a tricky situation and a half. Then you also have the mistake of thinking yourself into inaction or even madness, but that's an entire topic on its own.

I used to watch Sargon of Akkad, the old Amazing Atheist, Devon Tracey (Atheism-is-unstoppable), Thunderf00t etc. for their debunking SJWs/feminists/theists content, and luckily enough, I didn't go further down the alt-right pipeline than that. While in that bubble, I distinctly remember having a moment of clarity, thinking "What if the other side is actually right? What if I'm actually being insensitive?". I think my heart was already in the right place, just that my mind was getting stuck.

Joey Diaz is pretty Red, especially in the early days.

Dark night of the soul is when your ego deals with the ramifactions of awakening on its attachments and survival mechanisms, which can be a painful process. It ends when all resistance falls away. I've essentially been in a more or less constant state of dark night of the soul for the last 2 years.

If you're not taking any sedatives, painkillers or dissociatives, quit everything all at once. Drug withdrawal is a high in itself. Doing drugs is about outsourcing your endogenous regulatory capacity to exogenous sources. It makes the stability of the internal state more dependent on external stimuli. Spirituality and health is about upregulating the regulatory capacity of the system itself. It makes the stability of the internal state less dependent on external stimuli. Unshackle yourself from chemical slavery.

You choose to eat the cheeseburger. You don't choose to get hit by a drunk driver or COVID-19.

[Citation needed]

Actually, it seems like wikipedia indeed uses a pharmacological definition of "psychedelic" ("5HT2A agonists"). My bad ?. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug So according to that definition, MDMA is considered a weak psychedelic (judging by the ratio of its main mechanism of action – 5HT release – to 5HT2A agonism)... but then this also means that 5-MeO-DMT is only a weak psychedelic, as its main mechanism of action is actually 5HT1A, not 2A (1 to 100 difference). Curiously though, the main metabolite of MDMA – MDA – has twice the amount of 5HT2A agonism of MDMA (and is more commonly referred to as a psychedelic), and because psilocybin is also classified as a psychedelic while only serving as the prodrug to its metabolite psilocin, then that would strengthen MDMA's position as a psychedelic as well. On the other hand, I think the word "entheogen" has more to do with the context the substance is used in rather than the qualitative effects of the substance itself. For example, "rapé" (shamanic snuff) is just tobacco. Likewise, cannabis is used as an entheogen in many cultures. It's more of a cultural thing than a pharmacological thing. However, the reason I called the word "psychedelic" a cultural artefact is because the word stems from the so-called "classical psychedelics" (LSD, mescaline, DMT, psilocybin) that became popular in the 60s. It just simply happens that all of those are mainly 5HT2A agonists, and therefore that word probably translated more easily into the pharmacological definition later on. MDMA on the other hand only became popular much later through 80s rave culture, which is probably why it didn't become as readily associated with the word "psychedelic". Another example of the culture/historicity issue is the term "hallucinogen", which was coined in the 50s to describe the newly discovered classical psychedelics. Today, it spans a much wider range of substances, which includes psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants.

"Psychedelic" is more a cultural artefact than an accurate pharmacological class.

I was ageeing with you. Not every response has to be taken as a counterclaim.

Many people misunderstand the role of effort in spiritual growth. There is nothing wrong with effort. Effort and effortlessness is a duality that needs to be transcended. People who are enlightened either did a lot of work in this lifetime or in past lives in order to get to where they're at today. Sure, the few milliseconds before enlightenment may be described as an effortless and authentic expression of "being-here-now", but if you look at the years of struggle leading up to that point, that description is far from the case.

You would have no problems with that word if you had the chops to become enlightened . All the spiritual teachers that I've heard talk about past lives said that they had been on the path for a looong time before awakening in this lifetime.

You need lifetimes of spiritual practice to become enlightened, probably around 100k hrs in total. That is why it might seem impossible in just one lifetime. It's never too late to start though

Suicide is not the answer, because that is yet another survival drive masking itself as an "ultimate solution for everything". A solution for what exactly?: Well, only the fullfillment of another survival need. You have to give up the thing that is driving you towards suicidal thoughts. Only the ego wants an ultimate solution. Enlightenment doesn't come as a result of turning away from life. It comes from gradually acing life and going beyond it. Look at Sadhguru's life before awakening at 25. He was running multiple successful businesses. Suicide was the last thing on his mind at that moment. His being was simply ready to evolve to the next level, and all of it was several lifetimes in the making.

Visionaries seem unrealistic to the common man, because they focus on what reality will come to be, rather than what reality is at the present. To be honest, what Daniel is doing isn't very dissimilar to what Leo is doing. It's just that he takes a much more collective/social lens while Leo tends to take a more self-development lens. Forward-thinking and optimism has sort of become an accepted part of self-development, meanwhile collective issues are much often seen in a pessimistic light, because of the complexity and slow-moving nature of social systems. Besides that, both are really talking about the same things.